What is the value of aesthetic investigation? Our conference invites scholars and art world figures to offer their own assessments, defences and remedies.

A century ago aesthetics was of central concern for philosophers and psychologists alike. For much of the last century, the study of the arts often seemed marginalised, with relatively little cross-talk between aesthetics and areas considered more central to philosophy. By contrast the art world was strongly influenced by philosophically
inflected theories of institutions, the text and spectatorship, and yet there was little engagement with Anglo-American aesthetics. There is evidence that matters are looking up. Work on fictionality within literary contexts standardly serves as a resource for work in
metaphysics on the nature of fictional objects. Work on the imagination feeds back into the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. There is also a growing list of publications in aesthetics from such unexpected directions as neuroscience and evolutionary
psychology—-developments not universally welcomed within the aesthetics community.
The conference will draw together and address these developments asking how philosophical aesthetics might progress . The conference has three themes:

• Aesthetics and philosophy
• Aesthetics and the art world
• Aesthetics and the human sciences

In addition, we will have a panel discussion on teaching aesthetics in art school and other non-philosophical contexts.